The world has always been multipolar.
It was only ever a grand illusion of the West that its leaders ruled a unipolar world.
The illusion took hold in 1990 when American neoconservative and neoliberal necromancers joined hands to chant their old American supremacist spells.
The chance to dissolve the Cold War alliance, NATO, was spurned. America would not withdraw its troops and bases from Western Europe like Gorbachev and his successors withdrew theirs from Warsaw Pact states. NATO’s promise “not to move one inch eastward” was broken, and, as Richard Sakwa argues in The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (2024), the West lost the peace, or carried on with a covert Cold War.
Temporary military advantage and turkey shoots in minor states in Western Asia turned into a revolution in military affairs and grand strategies to rule the world from the Situation Room. Generals came to believe America could defeat everyone. Politicians asked them to crush anyone who dared to talk back.
A surge of wealth, talent and resources released from the Soviet Union and China transformed the global economy. But the Washington Consensus believed these new terms of trade were proof of the mandate of heaven.
American and Western European leaders set out to loot and pillage the former Soviet territories, under the cover of liberal democracy. They sought to buy the compliance of China’s leaders, those pragmatic communists, with the American pipe dream of Chimerica. The apparent dominance of the US finance and tech industries, at least until 2008, persuaded most of the world to go along for the ride.
The spells worked their way into global minds through a new magic ether, the internet. So-called journalists spread the new gospel of the latest American manifest destiny. We all came to search for knowledge in Google, to get our news from the algorithm, and to share our stories via American Big Tech.
Screens and bytes put on everyone’s lips the magic word, globalization. It became the buzz word of the century, and started a grand historical myth: by winning the Cold War the USA had established a unipolar world.
I recall the infectious spread of this bad idea from my days as a young bureaucrat in the 1990s. History had ended. Politics became, in some theories, technocratic, and, in truth, rather banal marketing. Every leader wanted to go to Davos. Every city wanted to be like Silicon Valley. I recall talking with one Labor-friendly senior bureaucrat who was enthused with the brave new world of globalisation. “Doesn’t your view of globalisation depend on what place in the world you live in?” I asked modestly. The grand illusions, however, marched on.
Like most myths, the myth of the unipolar world was part pharmacy, part poison. It flattened the world, in the words of journalist and 2024 WEF-panellist, Thomas Friedman. It remade the world, in the eyes of the golden billion, into an open plain of opportunity; but, in the eyes of the global majority, it distorted the world into a two-dimensional plane, with one axis, American wars, and the other, the US dollar.
The myth blinded leaders to the real history of the world. Their misreading of history was apparent even in the 1990s. While futurists went wild with predictions of a global-American golden age, historians assembled a truer map of the chaotic cross-currents of globalisation across the long sweep of human history. The historians discovered that globalisation did not begin in 1990. It was not led by the USA or the WEF. It was a process that has occurred at different intensities and forms since our ancestors walked from Africa to the Australian coast. It was the process of exchange across long distances of people, resources, biota and ideas. That is the historian’s definition of globalisation. This process never emanates from a single pole, never is controlled by a single power, and never remains within the iron cage of the liberal rules-based order.
As early as 1995, the world historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto offered an alternative account to the end of history in a flat world. In Millenium, he predicted that initiative in the world will continue to shift.
“The period of ‘Atlantic supremacy’ has been brief; if a period of Pacific-rim initiative does succeed it, it will probably be briefer.”
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millenium.
The myth of the unipolar world belongs to the period of Atlantic supremacy and American exceptionalism. Those myths have crashed to earth over the last decade, confirming Fernández-Armesto’s reluctant prophecy. Both Trump and Biden proved the American republic broken. Endless wars fizzled into shameless defeats. Half a million Ukrainians died so America could “fight Russia over there, not over here”. BlackRock bargained with the oligarchs for the blood-soaked black soil of the Steppe. The last shreds of humane values were shelled to smithereens in Gaza. Prudence was bombed in Yemen, and world peace may soon be delivered a final vengeful killing blow in Iran.
The pace of collapse and the pain of collateral damage has intensified since February 2022, and again since October 2023. Whether we wanted to or not, we are living in interesting times. And today many analysts believe a multipolar world is slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.
But the term, ‘multipolar world’ does not fully describe how the world is changing. We should not replace the illusion of a unipolar world with a new illusion of a multipolar world in which BRICS rules the roost, and Australia as always acts the sub-imperial coward.
The world does not lurch from one world order to another. It is not a succession of neatly categorised ages. Multipolarity is a better idea than ‘liberal rules-based order’. It does convey a better sense of the real world of many actors and many processes at work behind the curtain of world politics. But we do not need to invent fictions of new world orders to learn to live with equanimity with our neighbours, without hatred of outsiders, and in tune with a changing world.
‘Wisdom is to live in tune with the mode of the changing world’
Thiruvalluvar, the ancient Tamil poet and philosopher.
An alternative way to conceive these interesting times is as a turning of the tides of globalisation. Since 1800 the West has surfed the waves of globalisation. For a time it ran the world. It came to believe Western civilization will always lead the global order. After 1990, it let its temporary power go to its head.
But the initiative has shifted. The directions of the tides have moved. BRICS+ and other nations are now changing the world, and exchanging people, resources and ideas along different routes. Globalisation is no longer Westernisation. It is time for any remaining diplomats and insightful leaders of the West, including Australia, to learn from the real histories of the rest of the world.
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From 1 March 2024, I am starting Season 1 of World History Explorers: Civilizations. In a 90-day challenge we will explore the history of civilizations in every environment on earth by reading just one book, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations.
I would love to get to know some substack readers better there. And feel free to share with your history-curious friends .
Until next week, take care and remember what thou lovest well will not be reft from thee.